The Kiwi Option

Evan Osnos at the New Yorker writes on some rich Americans' plans to make New Zealand their bolthole, should everything there go wrong.

If a silo in Kansas is not remote or private enough, there is another option. In the first seven days after Donald Trump’s election, 13,401 Americans registered with New Zealand’s immigration authorities, the first official step toward seeking residency—more than seventeen times the usual rate. The New Zealand Herald reported the surge beneath the headline “trump apocalypse.”

In fact, the influx had begun well before Trump’s victory. In the first ten months of 2016, foreigners bought nearly fourteen hundred square miles of land in New Zealand, more than quadruple what they bought in the same period the previous year, according to the government. American buyers were second only to Australians. The U.S. government does not keep a tally of Americans who own second or third homes overseas. Much as Switzerland once drew Americans with the promise of secrecy, and Uruguay tempted them with private banks, New Zealand offers security and distance. In the past six years, nearly a thousand foreigners have acquired residency there under programs that mandate certain types of investment of at least a million dollars.

Jack Matthews, an American who is the chairman of MediaWorks, a large New Zealand broadcaster, told me, “I think, in the back of people’s minds, frankly, is that, if the world really goes to shit, New Zealand is a First World country, completely self-sufficient, if necessary—energy, water, food. Life would deteriorate, but it would not collapse.” As someone who views American politics from a distance, he said, “The difference between New Zealand and the U.S., to a large extent, is that people who disagree with each other can still talk to each other about it here. It’s a tiny little place, and there’s no anonymity. People have to actually have a degree of civility.”

New Zealand could be an important part of any billionaire's apocalypse insurance portfolio, but they shouldn't put too many eggs in one basket.

If there were a zombie apocalypse that started anywhere other than New Zealand, it's hard to imagine a safer place to hide out than New Zealand. Zombies wouldn't be able to cross the oceans to get here. We'd probably need to have the coast guard watching out for derelict zombie ships running aground here, but that would be about it. Under most standard zombie scenarios anyway.

If they're worried about nuclear war, New Zealand won't be on anybody's 'let's bomb these jerks first' list, although it could be a useful demonstration project that might not draw retaliation in the same way that bombing other places might. North Korea could demonstrate their ability to hit the US by hitting us, and it's plausible that nobody would hit them back for it. Pretty low likelihood though. But if there were anything big, we'd be doomed by the ice age that followed. Maybe some folks in Rotorua would make it through, with greenhouses powered by pipes going down into the volcano.

For other apocalypses, your best defence is to be in a really wealthy place. Not just 'per capita' wealthy: New Zealand does well on 'per capita' wealthy. But rather substantial masses of resources ready to be thrown at bad things. A California earthquake, when it comes, will be terrible - but it's a rich state in a rich country. It'll sort. If an Auckland volcano blew, that would be distinctly not good. And while small places on the fringe of the world are great bolt-holes against terrorism, they're not so hot if the entire international trade apparatus falls over in a new round of nationalist protectionism. Bigger places can do near-autarky better than smaller places.

But it will be great for New Zealand to have some of these folks make the place home. Peter Thiel now has a New Zealand bolt-hole (he's been a fan for a while); I wonder what it'll do for New Zealand tech startups access to venture capital. Most of NZ Twitter (and Toby Manhire) doesn't seem impressed that Thiel's been granted citizenship; I think it's awesome. He's one of the world's most interesting people. You don't have to agree with somebody on every issue to think that it's excellent that he's moved here. And his early backing of Seasteading is particularly awesome.

Here's Tyler Cowen's talk with Thiel from a couple years ago.



HT on the New Yorker piece: Tricia Wood

Previously:

• Emigration
• Libertarian migration
• Revealed preferences and liberty

Migration beats activism

I agree with everything in Bryan Caplan's post. If you have the option to move away from an oppressive place, moving makes far more sense than trying to change the system. You're doing pointless harm to your family by staying.

Now imagine that you live in a place that, while pretty prosperous, has a whole lot of things you find oppressive. You spend a lot of time complaining about those things. Your sons stand a non-trivial chance of someday being drafted into the army or some kind of national service. While you don't find the laws against using drugs to be personally binding, there's the lowish probability risk of being subject to an erroneous no-knock armed police raid if the cops get something wrong. Cops kill people very often in these raids; at best, they just terrify your children. If you drive near the country's borders, the internal security police might stop you and demand your papers. There's the low but real risk that the cops will just decide to seize whatever cash you have with you. The schools are guarded like a prison camps. You like betting on odd claims; the local police in your county have a history of showing up at the front door of people who make bets and shooting them - this happened to a dentist just a few miles from your own house. And the police could use selections from your anarchist writings to ex post justify just about anything they decided to do, if you get the unlucky lotto ticket. If your kids screw up a bit when they're older or are even suspected of having done so (again, low but non-zero chance), the system's really pretty horrible. If one of your children messes up and sells drugs even once from your house (very very unlikely, but not impossible), the government can make you homeless.

While you're able to live most of the time unimpeded by this stuff in a bubble of like-minded friends, the random-draw risks are a bit worrying. You could kinda model it as living in a nice place, but with a small risk that you and your family will be the ones selected for some horrible annual ritual sacrifice. You never attend the annual sacrificial ritual despite its broad popularity; you instead do what you can to try and stop the ritual. Maybe you have more protection against being selected for the annual sacrifice ritual than do most folks because you're not really in the typically preyed-upon cohort, but that risk is still there. You pay your taxes, knowing that that money is taken to fund the annual sacrificial ritual.

Yes, the case for migrating out of really terrible third world places is definitely much much stronger than the case for moving out of Fairfax County. But still...

Previously:

• Libertarian migration
• Revealed preferences and liberty
• Emigration

Make your list

So it turns out that the NSA has been scooping up rather a bit of information about Version Verizon customers in the States. It hasn't been entirely a secret prior to now; it would be a bit surprising if the other phone companies didn't have other similar systems in place.

JD Tuccille notes that Americans travelling within America, but within 100 miles of the border, are getting stopped at checkpoints on the interstate for citizenship checks.

A couple of months ago, when Alex Tabarrok complained of his son's school being turned into a police camp, I noted some of the differences between American schools and the ones here, concluding:

You can choose to live like this too. Sure, New Zealand is getting worse, and it's definitely worse than some parts of the US if marijuana freedom is an important part of your bundle of liberties. But NZ is starting from a much better spot than the US, and it seems to be getting worse slower than other places.

Things aren't bad enough to leave yet? Fine. Freedom's a value, but so too are other things like distance from family and wealth differentials and access to Ethiopean restaurants. But write down today some bright-line rules that you think should trigger your future exit; it's easy to acclimatize to gradual changes for the worse.

If you really want to live free, write down your list of things that would actually be sufficient to trigger your emigration, then think about the places you might go that offer the best deal on the bundle of freedoms that matters most to you.

If you're instead happy getting consumption benefits from ranting about the deterioration of freedom in America, or from imagining that you'll be able to change things there, carry on.

Here in New Zealand, we should be especially vigilant against importing American spy regs. It's awfully tempting for some folks in Wellington to be seen to be team players by signing onto things the Americans want. I hope we're especially careful with the Telecommunications Interception Capability & Security Bill. New Zealand can become relatively more attractive simply by standing still.

Update: Emigration won't help you against this one. It might make things worse.

The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.

The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows them to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.

The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide Powerpoint presentation – classified as Top Secret with no distribution to foreign allies – which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims "collection directly from the servers" of major US service providers.

Although the presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies, all those who responded to a Guardian request for comment on Thursday denied any knowledge of any such program. ...

The PRISM program allows the NSA, the world's largest surveillance organisation, to obtain targeted communications without having to request them from the service providers and without having to obtain individual court orders.

With this program, the NSA is able to reach directly into the servers of the participating companies and obtain both stored communications as well as perform real-time collection on targeted users.

The presentation claims PRISM was introduced to overcome what the NSA regarded as shortcomings of Fisa warrants in tracking suspected foreign terrorists. It noted that the US has a "home field advantage" due to housing much of the internet's architecture. But the presentation claimed "Fisa constraints restricted our 'home field advantage'" because Fisa required individual warrants and confirmations that both the sender and receiver of a communication were outside the US.

I expect we instead need a Bruce Schneier guide on secure internet use.

Is there some Chinese version of Google I can flip everything over to? If somebody's going to be sniffing through all my email, family photos, chat sessions and the like, I'd sooner it be them. At least they're honest about it.

So where the bloody hell are ya?

Oliver Hartwich's column in the NBR reminded me of the old Australian tourism campaign that highlighted all the beautiful empty places there, then asked "So where the bloody hell are ya?"

Hartwich notes that New Zealand's openness to immigration and wide variety of skilled migrant categories for fast-tracked work visas that lead quickly to residence haven't turned into a flood of new immigrants; he says we gained a net 12 people in the year to January. Hartwich worries that the sales job we do for the tourists isn't the sales job we need to do to make people want to live here. "Clean and Green" is nice to visit. But there are lots of places like that.

New Zealand has far more to offer than its natural beauty. We should let the world know about it.

While the Australian tourism ads hide the ridiculously terrifying spiders, ours don't mention the cost of living. New Zealand is a very expensive place to live. Housing is exceptionally expensive for what you get by international standards. The government now seems committed to breaking the local urban planning nightmares that entrench high land prices. I hope they do a thorough job of it.

I agree with Oliver that the branding needs to change. New Zealand has an absolute advantage in beauty, but there are lots of other countries that have beautiful vistas. Our comparative advantage is our sane policy environment. We are growing insane more slowly than the rest of the world. There are threats to our "Outside of the Asylum" status. But, on the whole, we do well. Nobody here thinks the Prime Minister should have a button that lets him murder people, domestically or abroad, citizen or not, for example. And we don't have police checkpoints where thugs demand to know whether you're a citizen. New Zealand ranks as the most free country in the world. It's worth testing whether a campaign targeting that would work.

I met this morning with Chris Read, who took on my honours project this year to test the sensitivity of international migration to differences in measured freedom. That might be a first cut in seeing whether this kind of campaign could prove effective.

I worry that Americans claiming to love liberty, by revealed preference, might just really enjoy carping about civil liberties whenever their preferred party is in opposition. Few of the Democrats who hated what Bush did to civil liberties seem to mind when it's their guy with the murder-button; few of the Republicans rightly excoriating Obama said much when Bush started this all up. Moving, that's expensive, takes you far from friends and family, depreciates your social capital, and might cause an income drop. And being outraged on Twitter is more fun when the hated other team is in the same country. I'm starting to think that you people actually like US airport security because you get to complain about it when the other team is in office and fantasize about how your team would change things. Prove me wrong.

Oh - The Economist just listed New Zealand as the best place in the world for working women. We somehow managed this while having very free labour markets and minimal obligations placed on employers around maternity leave. Maybe New Zealand's been on the right track by subsidising daycare rather than making it really expensive to hire women of childbearing age. Again, we do well by being Outside of the Asylum.

Living free

Alex Tabarrok wrote a letter to his son's high school principal, hoping that the school will not become even more like a prison.

Thank you for requesting feedback about the installation of interior cameras at the high school. I am against the use of cameras. I visited the school recently to pick up my son and it was like visiting a prison. A police car often sits outside the school and upon entry a security guard directs visitors to the main office where the visitor’s drivers license is scanned and information including date of birth is collected (is this information checked against other records and kept in a database for future reference? It’s unclear). The visitor is then photographed and issued a photo pass. I found the experience oppressive  Adding cameras will only add to the prison-like atmosphere. The response, of course, will be that these measures are necessary for “safety.” As with security measures at the airports I doubt that these measures increase actual safety, instead they are security theater, a play that we put on that looks like security but really is not.

...

When we surround our students with security we are implicitly telling them that the world is dangerous; we are whispering in their ear, ‘be afraid, do not venture out, take no risks.’ When going to school requires police, security guards and cameras how can I encourage my child to travel to foreign countries, to seek new experiences, to meet people of different faiths, beliefs and backgrounds? When my child leaves school how will the atmosphere of fear that he has grown up in affect his view of the world and the choices he will make as a citizen in our democracy? School teaches more than words in books.

Tuesday I attended an lunch for international families at my five year old's elementary school. The school, like most NZ schools, is a series of buildings with no internal connections. So, kids run around between buildings pretty regularly. There's a low fence around the school property, but no real checks at the gates other than teachers having some idea of who might be parents. Visitors are asked to check in at the office; parents don't particularly bother though. And, part of the schoolyard is a short-cut from the University campus to a very good dim-sum place - I walked through pretty often even before the five year old attended.

Susan and I walked over to the building where the lunch was being held, bringing our pot-luck lunch contribution, said hello, and joined in for a pleasant lunch with other families. Nobody was checking that food was made in licensed kitchens. Nobody challenged us or checked ID. There are no metal detectors or security guards. There are no security cameras. Just peaceful people enjoying the kind of company that should be the birthright of everyone, and was common in the America of thirty years ago.

You can choose to live like this too. Sure, New Zealand is getting worse, and it's definitely worse than some parts of the US if marijuana freedom is an important part of your bundle of liberties. But NZ is starting from a much better spot than the US, and it seems to be getting worse slower than other places.

Things aren't bad enough to leave yet? Fine. Freedom's a value, but so too are other things like distance from family and wealth differentials and access to Ethiopean restaurants. But write down today some bright-line rules that you think should trigger your future exit; it's easy to acclimatize to gradual changes for the worse.

Previously:

• Reason to love NZ #57: Airports
• NZ airports (continued)
• ...and international travel is easy too
• Revealed preferences and liberty
• Libertarian diasporas
• Libertarian migration

Kiwi Freedom

New Zealand is the best country in the world if you weigh up a bundle of economic and personal liberties. I've argued this more than a few times, and I've teased American libertarians about their commitment to liberty if they're unwilling to consider emigrating here because of the drop in income or difficulty in convincing relatives to come along. This is no problem for a pluralist who weighs liberty up among other values, but it is a problem for folks who claim to put a very strong weight on freedom and who wear Live Free Or Die t-shirts.

For rather a while, we've had world economic freedom rankings that have placed New Zealand at or near the top. The Fraser Institute, the Cato Institute, and the Liberales Institut have today released an aggregate Human Freedom Index.

Using indicators consistent with the concept of negative liberty—the absence of coercive constraint—we have tried to capture the degree to which people are free to enjoy classic liberties in each country: freedom of speech, religion, individual economic choice, and association and assembly. The freedom index is composed of 76 distinct variables including measures of safety and security, freedom of movement, and relationship freedoms such as assembly or legal discrimination against gays. In this preliminary index New Zealand ranks as the most free country in the world, followed by the Netherlands and then Hong Kong. Australia, Canada, and Ireland follow, with the United States ranking in 7th place.

I have a few quibbles with the index (here is the full index), but I expect that they're all things that would be tough to incorporate with data for any large number of countries.

The index of government threats to individuals rightly includes extrajudicial killings, torture, political imprisonment and disappearances. But it doesn't include the number of individuals imprisoned for victimless crimes like prostitution and drug use. The US would fare poorly here, but New Zealand wouldn't do well on the drugs side either. Potential variables here could include an indicator for whether sex work is legal or illegal; an indicator for whether drug possession is legal or illegal; annual expenditures on drug enforcement; proportion of the prison muster whose offending relates to drug use or drug trafficking.

Threats to private property rightly include theft, burglary and inheritance takings, but miss civil asset forfeiture. I can't easily see how this could be quantified in a big cross-section.

One of the biggest regularly experienced differences in personal freedom between New Zealand and America is airport security. There is zero risk that this kind of thing happens in New Zealand. Again, I don't know how you could quantify this for any large number of countries.

Further, our police are unarmed and remain so despite the police rather frequently asking the government that they be allowed to carry weapons. One option that might capture the overall level of "police state" impositions would be to include the total police budget as a bad while also counting experienced crime rates as a bad. I suppose that America's ranking of 5 on "Extrajudicial killing" captures some of this (NZ scores a 10).

Finally, there's no accounting for the growing scourge of paternalistic regulation around alcohol, tobacco, and the like. Sin taxes as proportion of aggregate government revenues could be a start, and should be feasible, but it would be harder to get comprehensive data on whether you're allowed to brew your own beer, ease of starting a brewery, and restrictions on smoking on private property. I love that, in New Zealand, people can move really easily from goofing around in their garage with a completely legal home still or beer-making kit to selling their product to willing customers. In America...

The index a great start though, and I'm especially glad that this data has come out in this, the "setting honours projects" time of year. I'm consequently putting this up as a potential honours project; incoming Canterbury honours students, take note, but also note that this is my working draft of the project and that I might improve it based on comments.

The weight of freedom: economic and personal liberties in a gravity model of international migration.

We typically assume that people move from country i to country j because doing so makes them better off. But what precisely proves attractive? Karemera et al (2000) show that a modified gravity model can explain a decent share of international migration: origin-country population, destination-country income, and origin-country restrictions on emigration explain much. Lewar and Van den Berg (2008) show that institutions and distance also matter. Ashby (2007) shows that, within the United States, those states with greater economic freedom draw more migrants, but only because of increased expected income rather than because of the direct effects of freedom per se.

In this project, you will start by figuring out gravity models. Your supervisor has no experience with them either, but we can likely work things out.

Next, you’ll take the Fraser Institute’s newly created Freedom Index which compiles both economic and personal liberties to develop an aggregate freedom score: note that New Zealand is the best country in the world by this measure. The index compiles 76 separate variables relating to economic and personal liberties.

You will add these personal and economic liberties as explanatory variables into a gravity model of international migration to find out:

1. Does liberty enter positively into migration decisions? 
2. What’s the elasticity of migration with respect to economic and personal liberties?
3. What is the value of freedom? A standard deviation increase in personal or economic liberty counts as much as what in a gravity model? I want you to be able to say something like “All else equal, a standard deviation increase in personal freedom [economic freedom] is the equivalent of reducing (or increasing, who knows) the distance between two countries by XXX kilometres or increasing the expected income jump from migration by $YYY.” How much less attractive would New Zealand be to international migrants were we to fall in this ranking? People deciding to emigrate often have choice among country destinations. Singapore is richer than New Zealand but ranks 39^th in overall freedom and scores only a 6.6 in personal freedoms. How much extra income does a move have to provide, in expectation, to make it worth dropping a point in personal freedom?

You’re going to have to sort out how to work with the OECD migration database, figure out what scope is feasible given that data within an honours project, and then run things. Do not select this project unless you have done reasonably well in undergraduate econometrics. But it’s going to be hellafun and I think it could be publishable if you do a decent job of it.

Initial Sources:

Ashby, N. 2007. “Economic freedom and migration flows between U.S. states”. Southern Economic Journal 73:3 (January), 677-97.
Karemera, D., V.I. Oguledo, and B. Davis. 2000. “A gravity model analysis of international migration to North America”. Applied Economics 32:13, 1745-55.
Lewer, J. and H. Van den Berg. 2008. “A gravity model of immigration”. Economic Letters 99:1 (April), 164-7.
OECD Migration Database available at http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=MIG [or, if you can find a better database, go for it]
Watkins, T. and B. Yandle. 2010. “Can freedom and knowledge economy indexes explain go-getter migration patterns?” Journal of Regional Analysis & Policy 40:2, 104-15.

I love setting honours projects.

An endorsement

Forbes repeats what I've been arguing here for rather a while.

New Zealand ranks first on our list of the Best Countries for Business, up from No. 2 last year, thanks to a transparent and stable business climate that encourages entrepreneurship. New Zealand is the smallest economy in our top 10 at $162 billion, but it ranks first in four of the 11 metrics we examined, including personal freedom and investor protection, as well as a lack of red tape and corruption.

I wish that their rankings on personal freedoms were more granular; NZ and the US both get a 1st place ranking. On average, I'd put NZ a fair bit higher than the US, though recent referenda in Colorado and Washington State may yet wind up changing that.

I used to say that personal freedom cannot be the most important thing to you if you live in the US and haven't tried emigrating to New Zealand. It's fine to trade personal freedom for income, but not to do so while claiming the paramount importance of freedom. But if your bundle of freedoms includes marijuana, you're now better off moving to Washington State or Colorado.

I hope that New Zealand looks hard at marijuana legalisation, with regulated markets like those for alcohol. We can't be the outside of the asylum if America gets more sane than us on drug policy.

Entrepreneurial migration to NZ

Our Prime Minister encourages rich people to move here; our immigration authorities make it easy too.

Kiwi tech entrepreneur Lance Wiggs provides some advice for potential migrants. His advice is targeted at Kiwis coming home but is more broadly applicable:

Coming back to New Zealand is often difficult after a heady career dealing, say, in billions of dollars. The economy and industry tiny here, our domestic industries are often sleepy versus their foreign peers, and many don't seem to understand offshore experiences.

So for those coming back after a senior career offshore, a word of advice: don't look for a job. Look instead to enter the really dynamic part of our economy by starting something new. As Prof. Paul Callaghan is fond of saying, we are very good in New Zealand at doing everything else.

Not for us the big dirty industries, nor the global consumer goods we all own, but instead the quiet conquering of global niches, such as online accounting or frequency control. There are plenty of people and tools to help, and New Zealand is a wonderfully easy place to start and run a business.

So if you are considering leaving, then make sure you come back bursting with ideas and energy to start something. And if you are considering a return, then now is the hour. New Zealand is doing reasonably well during this global recession, and it's time to get going and do something about addressing the markets in our enormous trade free zone.

Forbes today listed NZ as second overall among best countries for business. [Note: they seem to be using Heritage's rankings on trade freedom. I don't buy Heritage's rankings on trade freedom.]

We get top rankings in lack of red tape, investor protection, lack of corruption, and personal freedoms. The last one I find most important, but Forbes used a very broad brush in marking the personal freedom category. Most OECD countries wind up getting a rank of 1.

Personal liberties are a bundle of a whole lot of different things. For the bundle of freedoms about which I care most, NZ comes out on top. But I suppose that somebody who puts lots of weight on firearm ownership rights relative to not being subject to arbitrary exercise of police power could rank the US higher than NZ.

I also put reasonable weight on that, flying domestically in NZ, there's often not even a metal detector, never mind this sort of thing:

I continue to be amazed at how few American libertarians emigrate.

Reader mailbag

It's a pleasure to speak to you -- I am a longtime follower of your blog and I was hoping you had time to answer a few questions about moving to New Zealand. I have been considering it for a long time, but more so after your blog post about libertarians moving to more free countries.

As a way of introduction, I am a second year law student at [reasonably prestigious Boston-area university name redacted], and an active libertarian in [usual suspect libertarian organisations for lawyers redacted].

My biggest concern about moving to New Zealand is the currency and central bank. While the Fed has wreaked havoc on the US economy, I noticed that the Kiwi money supply has also increased significantly. I was hoping that you could shed some light on the strength of the central bank in New Zealand and if they lean towards austerity (like Germany or Australia). In many ways, I feel the move would be going from the pot to the frying pan. At least in the US, it's the "devil I know."

In addition, I was wondering if you had any resources that you relied on for making the transition, such as job websites or other informational websites.

Any advice or personal experiences you'd be willing to share would be very helpful!

Thank you so much in advance.

I replied:

The currency and the central bank would be the least of my worries if I were considering making your move. The RBNZ is far from perfect, but it's one of the better ones out there. They follow a reasonable inflation targeting regime that looks through one-off things like changes to the goods and services tax. Inflation targeting in a small open economy means the exchange rate's a bit volatile, but exchange rate movements also make inflation targeting a bit less onerous for the overall economy: if inflation pressures are strong, a hike in the interest rate bumps up the exchange rate which reduces the prices of our imports and pulls back the CPI without having to beat down the domestic economy quite as strongly. Or at least that's my read on it - I'm hardly a monetary or macro economist.

My bigger worries, were I in your shoes would be

1) Law here is an undergrad degree, not a postgrad degree, and the Bar doesn't do a lot to restrict entry. That's good policy overall, but it keeps lawyer salaries down. I'm also not sure how easy it is to practise in New Zealand with a foreign degree. Your best niche would probably be commercial law focusing on firms here in NZ trading with US firms. But I'd also expect that a fair number of US expat lawyers are in the same area.

2) The standard of living here is lower than the States. You will be poorer here than you would be in the States; the relative gap for lawyers at the top of the distribution would be very very large. The next few years in NZ are going to be a bit uncomfortable: the government's very likely to start some reasonably large spending cuts to get the deficit under control. But the positive is that they're likely to do this. Nobody in the States seems likely to do a damned thing until the system's about to explode. Here, it will take big cuts to programmes that were only enacted around 2005. Prior to that, we had no real structural issues. Since 2005, we implemented an idiotic version of EITC that's very expensive both in terms of deadweight cost and real spending. The government's also taken a hankering to bailing out things. I'm expecting changes in the next term for National, but they're pretty weak.

3) New Zealand is more free than the US, but the absolute time trend isn't great. I don't think we're set for any appreciable decline relative to the US, but we will decline in absolute terms.

4) It is damned far from home. A flight home to see your family will cost you about 50 hours travel round trip plus a substantial chunk of money. We're booking flights now for Winnipeg - it will cost $11K NZ for two adults, a 3-year old, and an in-lap infant. Skype is great, email is great. But face to face is hard to do. I have massively reduced the number of conferences I attend. I attend fewer than my University would be willing to pay for me to attend. The flights kill me.

5) Housing's overpriced, but not more so than in a lot of US cities. Mortgages are expensive - high interest rates.

I didn't bother pointing out the earthquakes as I reckon we can take them as read. Have I missed anything?

A move to New Zealand increases your experienced level of freedom, depending on which freedoms matter most to you. It's also a good choice for pacifists. It's no utopia, but it beats a whole lot of the alternatives. In fact, it recently ranked third in a wholly unscientific ranking of places to which one might wish to flee.

Markets in nothing: where's my kitfo?

Gallop reports New Zealand is third-ranked in the world potential net migration indices. Global survey nets for each country how many folks say they'd like to leave, how many folks would like to move there, and takes the net as a fraction of overall population. We could see a 170% increase in population, by these figures. And we have plenty of room for a doubling of population so long as they don't all want to be in Auckland.

Sixth from the bottom of the list: Ethiopia, where half the population wants to leave.

And I cannot find a single Ethiopean restaurant anywhere in New Zealand. Closest one: Melbourne.